I’m not sure you’re conversing in good faith here.
“Starving your children” as opposed to traditions of fasting? You’re heavily loading the language in a negative way here.
What you’re doing is the equivalent of me, in disciplining my children by insisting they “take some quiet time and think about what they’ve done in their room” as being tantamount to “Hotahk thinks locking children up is good for them”.
Yes, fasting may present dangers to children, and I don’t disbelief that some will put undue pressure on children to engage with it (and others won’t) but acting as if the whole tradition is equivalent to “starving children” directly is just disingenuous and hyperbolic and reads like a Daily Mail headline honestly.
And also what is “many” in the article? What %? So some children are encouraged to do so, but what does that mean? It certainly can’t mean we take aim at Ramadan in general surely because there are instances of people “doing it wrong” because on that basis you’d have to ban pretty much every human behaviour/institution that has ever existed surely?
I mean the christian catholic church was meant to be a refuge for the innocent and needy. I don’t think I need to tell anyone here about the problems it has faced with priest behaviour in areas and certain topics? What, did you ban catholicism? Priests? No, you rooted the bad apples out.
Same principle applies here surely? Critique those who do Ramadan “wrong” but don’t act as if it’s Ramadan’s fault when it literally says “children don’t have to do it” because that line of thinking was never taken with other religions now was it?
If they’re encouraged to do so by the parents, when fasting says they don’t need to. then who is really to blame here? That is the question you need to ask yourself
And again, I wouldn’t take my news from news sites as they 90% of the time are usually anti-Islamic about everything.
Actually start asking Muslim families such as myself. And remember, there are more than a Billion Muslims world wide. We don’t like to be generalized into one group of stereotype.
Blaming the religion when the religion literally says “they’re exempt” because the parents who happen to be insisting are Muslim is simply using it as an excuse to have a pop at Islam imo. Particularly when you consider there are thousands upon thousands of muslim families out there that do not insist their children fast at all.
Pretty much every religion has ideas that can be used the wrong way, or taken bizarrely, but you need to take it with nuance.
I mean should we ban/outlaw Buddhist ideas regarding extinction of the ego and self because Soka Gakkai happened to think a really good way to go about getting rid of these materialistic ideas was by bombing areas (despite the fact the Dhammapada quite literally says abstain from harm as the first noble precept)? No, because that would be nonsense clearly when you consider a good amount of Buddhists grapple with the idea simply by being mindful of what they use, what they need, and what they don’t need.
Good thing that I’m not a Christian and that I don’t feel compelled to defend Christianity then.
The “yeah we do this, but you do that!” counter argument won’t work here I’m afraid.
Which is why they’re problematic and cause huge human right issues everywhere in the world.
